Varun Feroze Gandhi (born March 13, 1980, New Delhi, India) is an Indian politician. He is the great grandson of Nehru. He is the son of Sanjay Gandhi and Maneka Gandhi, the son and daughter-in-law of the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi.

Someone called the ongoing general elections in India a huge circus. Circus, it certainly is, but this time around it has more villains than clowns. And the villains have been breathing acid. Foul mouthed to the core, they have been ruthless and vengeful in their attacks.

Take, for instance, Varun Gandhi, the son of Sanjay Gandhi whose campaign of forced sterilizations in Muslim dominated localities of Delhi in the 1970s is still considered a horrible blot on India's history. More so, because the zealous officials in charge of controlling the country's runaway population did not even spare young unmarried boys.

Well, Varun Gandhi, who has just been freed on a two-week parole, was recently captured live on camera as he was making an inflammatory speech in an election campaign in northern India. A candidate of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, Gandhi, spoke of cutting the limbs of those attacking Hindus. "Let such men go away to the other side (meaning Pakistan)," he thundered. He left nothing to imagination: it was clear that he was referring to Muslims.

However, what appeared incredible was his complete denial later. He said the video tapes had been doctored. India's courts did not buy this argument and he was sent to jail for offences under the National Security Act. India's Supreme Court gave him a breather when he promised in an affidavit that he would "not cause any disaffection among the communities either by words, spoken or written, or gestures and will not make any provocative speech which may lead to the disturbance of communal harmony."

One may argue here that Gandhi's inexperience and youth may be cited as an excuse, however unjustified it may be, for his utterances. But the other day, when the veteran 85-year-old Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Chief Minister of the southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, called Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the chief of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, his friend in a televised interview, it seemed unpardonable. Karunanidhi went a step further when he said the LTTE was not a terrorist organization, but some of its members could have become terrorists along the way! This was not the end of the story.

Karunanidhi, whose DMK is an ally of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance Government in New Delhi, tried retracting what he had uttered. He accused the television channel of quoting him selectively. I saw the program, and could vouch that it was a straight interview wherein the Chief Minister said all that had been ascribed to him.

Again, Vaiko, leader of another political party, Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, warned of a bloodbath in Tamil Nadu and the State's secession if Prabhakaran were to be harmed. His highly seditious speech was meant to cash in on an emotive issue: the affinity that Indian Tamil speaking population shares with its Sri Lankan counterpart.

Despite such political misdemeanors that often border on the incitement and provocation in an essentially poor country divided by 30 main languages and six main religions, elections and democracy are held with clockwork regularity. There was one exception, though. For some months during the 1975 "Emergency," the people's basic rights to choose their rulers were curtailed. In the years following the Emergency, there have been many "reasons" for the Government to suspend these rights: India's predominant Hindu caste system is based on tradition and feudalism that oppose universal suffrage; insurgency has wrecked havoc in Kashmir and parts of north-east India for decades and; Naxalites have led bloody rebellions in the country's interiors. Yet, India has never let its democratic institutions sink into oblivion, and elections have gone on, as they are now.

This time, they are being held in particularly difficult times as the world and India face a deep economic slump. Huge job losses in a nation where poverty and hunger are still disturbing forces have added to the general gloom. For the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, whose Congress Party had presided over the boom time and was one of those instrumental in opening up India's economy in the 1990s, these must be sad days. The man must have been rattled when the BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate, Lal Kishen Advani, described Singh as the weakest Prime Minister India has ever had.

Obviously, the Indian political tongue has got a little too large for its mouth, and such vitriolic assaults can damage the sensitive fabric of India's democratic system. Let alone personal attacks, some politicians are so brazen to divide the society through spiteful speeches that the judiciary now finds itself as a peace-keeper. The call of the hour is surely greater maturity: political organizations must not allow its members, especially those contesting the polls, to turn into hoodlums.

Gautaman Bhaskaran is a veteran film critic and writer who has covered Cannes and other major international festivals, like Venice, Berlin, Montreal, Melbourne, and Fukuoka over the past two decades. He has been to Cannes alone for 15 years. He has worked in two of India’s leading English newspapers, The Hindu and The Statesman, and is now completing an authorized biography of India’s auteur-director, Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Penguin International will publish the book, whose research was funded by Ford Foundation.